


Taken

by starkraving



Category: Destiny (Video Games)
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-04-29
Updated: 2020-04-29
Packaged: 2021-03-01 23:34:50
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 3
Words: 12,400
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/23905513
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/starkraving/pseuds/starkraving
Summary: Oryx knows her name and her nightmares. Eris Morn hunts dark gods. It’s not so surprising that they might haunt her back. Some events leading up to Eris Morn's departure from the Tower.
Relationships: Cayde-6 & Eris Morn, Eris Morn & Her Fireteam, Eris Morn & Ikora Rey
Comments: 2
Kudos: 11





	1. Chapter 1

In her nightmares, she sees them dying.

In her dreams, Eris struggles through a narrow shaft, webbed in filth, slick with miasmic fluid, elbow-crawling at a downward angle toward the antechamber within. In places, the canal is so narrow her shoulders and hips get caught and she writhes, the fieldweave suit scraping bruises into her thighs and ribs. The air is alive with screaming – the marrow-shuddering multi-tones of the Hive. She claws toward the green glow of toxic light. The muck slithers with maggots, like the stone is rotten flesh. She imagines them burrowing into her skin, hallucinates them tunneling black honeycombs in her body, making a nest of her veins and vessels. In her nightmares, sometimes, she pukes blind worms and beetles until they burst through her papery skin and she is reborn, screaming. 

But mostly, she reaches the mouth of the tunnel just in time to watch Sai open her soul like a conduit. She arrives in time to see her final blade dance. Sai lights up the dark in blinding blue-white – a black chasm separating her from Eris who peers out like an insect from the tunnel-gored wall. The swarm recoils like an organism. Sai flickers. She vanishes. She cuts through them like scythe through rotten wheat, cleaving them apart in ionic lines of Light and electricity. Sai Mota moves through them like chain lightning jumps, an invisible blur marked only by the dead, flashes of light in the dark. Instances of illumination. So fast it strobes the black in freeze frames of carnage and evisceration.

Sai Mota moves on the current of her Light, linked inexorably from one death to the next target, like electricity seeking infinitely to ground. She cuts and cuts and cuts until her blade finds the blade of the cursed Knight, the knife striking like a bolt from storm-heavy sky. The contact ignites the room with a sound like a thunder clap. For an instant Sai holds, suspended, hilt-to-hilt with a monster twice her fragile size, held magnetic to the strike by pure killing intent and Light – then Sai’s weapon explodes. The Hunter slams into the far wall, her right arm blown off at the elbow.

She crumples like a doll.

Eris doesn’t remember screaming but she screams now. She screams in the darkness and the sound loses itself among the voices of the Hive. Sai Mota rises, one-armed and grinning. Her remaining blade, broken at the hilt, she casts aside with a clatter. Staggers. She falls to hands and knees, panting. Bares her bloody teeth. She screams and punches a fist through the chest of a dead Acolyte on the ground besides her and from the rotten corpse she yanks serrated ribs.

She grips one like a knife and says, in Japanese, _“Come to me, motherfuckers. Dance with me, you dead sons of bitches.”_

Omnigul rises, chittering, laughing, one arm extended – an invitation, the path between her and the Hunter choked with Hive. Sai Mota makes it twenty meters into the writhing wall of thrall, tearing through them, one-armed, one blade, screaming her defiance – Omnigul stops her at twenty, her fist in the Bladedancer’s heart.

Eris wakes screaming.

Someone has their hands on her shoulders, holding her still with palms filigreed with Light. For a phantom instant, it burns like white phosphorous and Eris shrieks. She thrashes. Her aggressor cries out when she strikes them across the jaw, knocking them back and in the instant between the blow and the follow through, sanity returns. The dark confines of her ship come into focus. Her bunk, her walls marked with protective wards, Warlock sigils, Hive seal script. The back hatch is open, unlocked from the outside. Only one has the access pass to enter.

“Ikora.”

The Tower’s Warlock Vanguard turns, wiping blood from her lip. The metallic scent drifts coppery and powerful to Eris, intimate. She blocks it out, but extends a hand, shaky, palm down, toward the Warlock. For an instant, her friend remains where she is, shaken not by the blow but, likely, the dark seethe of the once-Guardian’s thoughts in her nightmares. Even now it hangs as psychic resonance in the room, dissipating like fumes. Oily and mad.

Then, gently, Ikora lifts a hand palm up to touch Eris’.

“I felt you, Eris.”

“You did not have to come.”

“Yes, I did. Your ship is still anchored off the Tower plaza. If it had gone on like it did, you would have woken the Praxic initiates who bunk two floors below. Their dreams would have taken darker shape.” A jolt of panic. “Your wards are wearing out. I will reforge your castings.”

“I apologize. I can take my ship out of the City as I should have –.”

“ _No_.” Ikora says it and in the single word, Eris feels the flare of ancient willpower. It reminds her of Eriana in the moment before Ikora’s temper cools. She sighs and takes Eris’ hand, gently, in her own. “I mean… you do not have to do that. It was nothing, Eris. Just a dream.”

“My dreams are dangerous. Afflicted. You know better than any how darkness fastens tight to those who have walked too long in shadow. I should not be near initiates.”

“No. You are an example to them. They admire you, you know and I will always recommend them to you in matters of will. There have been none who resist the dark as you. They should learn from you.”

“Zavala would despair to hear you say such a thing.”

“Zavala can unclench his asshole and allow light to pass through for an instant.”

Eris snorts.

“Ah,” says Ikora, fondly. “She laughs. Praise be.”

Eris swings her feet to the floor of her ship and Ikora joins her sitting on the sparse sleeping platform. Side by side they share the silence for a moment, the veteran Warlock casting cool eyes about the small craft. It’s a box really. A bed, a small work station behind the cockpit, recessed storage and lavatory facilities. She is inspecting the seal work, the runes and bindings carved and painted into the walls, floor, and ceiling. There are ashen talismans, ribbed weapons, strange baubles that seethe. She carefully pretends she didn’t see them. Instead, she runs distracted fingers over the lines scratched into the wall beside her.

“Toland’s?”

“Yes. Before he lost himself in in the tunnels, he taught me. You were right to cast him out. In the end, all he wanted to was find _her_.” She needn’t utter the name for Ikora to know of whom and what she speaks. “I know now that, at least, I am not as mad as he.”

“You were never mad, Eris. You merely did as needed, thought as needed, to survive your mission. And for that our debt cannot be paid.”

“It is paid. By the six who did what we could not, it is paid.”

“Perhaps, but not my debt to you.”

“I know nothing of it.”

Ikora smiles, briefly, at her then presses her hand to the wall. The runes that mar the ship’s interior briefly glow and pulse to a strange heartbeat. Ikora observes this a moment, then removes her hand and inspects her palm, as though the creases in the flesh might divine something for her that her brief psychic inspection did not.

“These wards… the fresh ones ward off the influence of others. Even out here, you fear Hive corruption?”

“Ancient evil has a long reach, Ikora. Even in the Tower a Warlock can be struck down by what finds their mind as it roves. You know this better than any.”

“I do.” The Vanguard makes a gesture, fingertips to her heart, then gently she bend down and touches the floor. Instantly the guardian wards flare hot then set fast – like metal struck molten then cooled, the new shapes insulated with power. The woman sits back, exhaling slightly. “That should keep out anything short of a god with a temper.” A wry smile. “Eris Morn – she who angers the gods. Herald to their destruction!”

“I hardly held the blade that did the deed.”

“No, but that fireteam carried your banner and your weapons and your words with them into the abyss. They carried your story – the ghosts of your comrades, their sacrifice, your will. They were your blade, Eris. They answered you and you delivered them to victory.”

“I am no hero.”

“You are, but I will not argue with you.”

“Let the young ones become legend. I only want peace.”

“Peace she says! While she fashions fireteams to slay gods.”

Ikora laughs and for a moment all is well. The ship hums, purring with new power, infused with Light and in the passing of one second to the next, there comes an incandescence – happiness, fleeting, but there. Rey is not wearing her usual heavy jacket but stripped down to a sleeveless tunic, her bare arms lines with dark purple tattoos, complex lines that pulse with an arterial tempo. Eris resists the temptation, always there, to lift a hand toward her friend as one might to a fire in the cold. Her Light moves around her, as natural as blood through veins, alive inside her and the part of Eris that is dark forever turns its face toward her sun.

If Ikora knows, senses, her longing… she is careful to ignore it.

“Do you need to discuss it? More and more, I feel that you dream as a Warlock dreams. Speaking aloud their contents may reveal ulterior shapes.”

“No, not in this case. I dream of them, as I always do. How they fell.”

Ikora lets that hang for a moment, concern in the low hum of her emotions, like a current behind her eyes. “You… rarely speak of their fates. Beyond the report of their deaths, beyond the records you managed to recover from the ones you found, you don’t speak of it.”

“Because it is unspeakable.”

“Then do not speak of it if it is not to be told to others. Only know that I will always listen.”

“Gratitude for that, Ikora Rey.”

Ikora begins to say something, but it’s then that a flicker of pale light flashes suddenly from her shoulder and the Guardian’s Ghost materializes gently in the air between them. A quiet companion, Ikora’s Ghost, it rarely speaks to others. It looks back and forth between them, curiously, its anterior sections rotating with a laconic slowness. It floats off, investigating the small ship space and for a moment Eris and Ikora say nothing, simply watch her small partner as it scans things. Bored quickly with this, it drifts lazily back to them and with no hesitation drifts down to rest on Eris’s knee.

“ _Oh_.” Eris says it before she can restrain herself.

Ikora’s Ghost ignores her small exclamation. Ikora smiles. “We are not frightened of you. You know that right?”

Eris hesitates then, with the back of a single fingertip, gingerly strokes one small panel on the Ghost’s tiny shell. She cannot admit (though she suspects that she can hide nothing from Ikora in this matter) the sudden and inexplicable damage it does her – the trust of a Guardian’s Ghost. The ache in her, where the Light once lived – it would be false to say that the darkness lifted, that the pain receded, the emptiness filled. It would be more accurate to say some small breath kindled an ember in the dark, bringing it briefly and brilliantly aglow.

“I do now.”

* * *

“Well,” says the Titan, so freshly minted the metal of his endoplating still shines. “I guess we could take down that nest in the Cosmodrome. If you like. I mean, it’s not much but…”

“Your aid in whatever capacity will not be forgotten, Titan.”

He smiles. Exo smiles are tricky and Eris out of practice with them, but by reflex she feels the smile in the flicker and pulse of his bio-lights. By body language he’s pleased, proud, maybe a little abashed of himself for feeling that way. He takes a token from her and leaves back to his fireteam who huddle eagerly to hear his report. It is, in a word, cute. The newer Guardians have been approaching her more freely now, their mentors no longer warding them off like parents shooing children from a fanatical street vendor.

It’s been three days since she woke violently and the morning sun has yet to break gray skies over the City, the great shape of the Traveler silhouetted behind a gray veil of fog. From here Eris can lean against the railing, observe the almost perfect sphere and its broken edges – hung open like a belly wound. Eris still feels it, even now, that small flame still within her – just a shadow now of their strange god’s gift. She watches the City and the Tower begin to wake.

“Fine day for killing Hive.”

Eris looks upward.

A head pokes out over the edge of the overhanging balcony above her. Cayde-6 waves. He has been sitting up there for some time she suspects, though she never felt him there. He hops down from his perch, landing with a bounce besides her. The Vanguard Hunter is cheerful. Beaming from beneath the hood of his battle-torn cloak. The construction of his face is such that he seems perpetually pleased and surprised though that is a trick of his inflexible facial construction. The Exo could be gut shot and hemorrhaging coolants and still look that way. 

“Howdy.”

“Good morning, Cayde. What brings the Hunter Vanguard?”

“Well, Ikora sent me. Seems to think that one of my Hunter problems might be in your wheelhouse.” He folds his arms across his chest, a friendly flicker in the flux of his eyes. “Was wondering if I could bark up your tree for a minute, get your opinion.”

“What is the trouble?”

A Ghost spins up from Cayde’s shoulder. “ _Hive ritual site. Hellmouth tunnels. A forward patrol pushed into a new chamber about two miles down from the Temple of Crota. Found evidence of something. Ikora and a few matrons in the Praxic order have expressed alarm about the confluence of dark energies around the sigil site. There is a small council being held and –”_

“The Warlocks are shitting bricks about it,” says Cayde summarily.

His Ghost glares its small single-optic glare. _“Yes. Well, the fireteam was a single cadre trio. Expert forward scouts. King Killer Cadre, actually. Arguably the strongest Hunter troop for Gunslingers of the variable shot style. Very capable and Hive-oriented since the assault on Crota’s dimension and therefore –”_

“Them boys and girls don’t fuck about.”

_“Yes, Cayde. The ritual site matches previously researched Hive arcana from the Vanguard libraries. The writings are by and large forbidden and only the highest tiers of the Praxic Order even have access to such knowledge. There is only a single known instance of such a ritual. The last known event that left such a trans-dimensional scar is the suspected transformation site of the lost Hunter, the owner of the cursed weapon, Thorn.”_

“The Warlocks are scared someone’s pulled another Yor.” Cayde is no longer remotely pleased sounding.

Eris tucks her arms together across her chest. “Are any Guardians unaccounted for?”

“There are always Guardians unaccounted for but as of right now we don’t have anyone officially missing. The Titans keep best record of their legions so at least there we know who’s rogue, who’s on mission, and who’s where. Warlocks have a few suspects, but none that know Hive shit well enough to do this. I’ve put out a call for head-count to the Hunter cadres but, eh, you know them. Headcounts are wishy-washy at best with all the lone wolves out there.” 

“And why does Ikora seek my counsel?”

_“Well… strictly speaking,”_ says the Ghost. _“She doesn’t.”_

“So Ikora did not send you so much as said something then specifically told you not to mention it?”

Cayde holds up two hands. “No offense, but I care less about your sensibilities than I do about my Hunters in the field. You’re a Hunter. So I think I can be candid about that. My team is still out there transmitting readings and I do not like them sitting in a Hive chamber sending info to eggheads. So, if Ikora thinks you’ve got firsthand knowledge I’m gonna ask about it.”

“You say the chamber is new? One unmapped even by myself.”

_“Yeah, seems that way.”_ The Ghost projects a small 3-D display of a worming tangle of tubes and bubbles that Eris recognizes as one of her own scan-maps. A chamber blinks in red near the bottom left fridge of the knotted display. “ _Here they are. This chamber. You know it?”_

“That is just beyond the crèche.”

“Creche?”

“The spawning pit. Where they breed and birth new swarm-level Hive, one of their darkest chambers. They must be significantly weakened if a fireteam has penetrated even to this level.”

“So you never saw this ritual site yourself?”

“No. I could never… I did not have the capability or desire to go beyond the spawning chamber.”

Cayde cannot see her eyes behind the bindings and even if he could, her hybrid machine-insect optics would tell him nothing of the horror. She briefly disconnects the optic nerve behind them, allows darkness inside her head. There, in the blackness, she sees the spawning chamber, the floors and walls writhing, fresh spawn and pupae glistening and slithering the darkness, half developed things, aborted and then reanimated. And among them – a single living being. She reconnects her eyes, finds Cayde tilting his head at her.

“Agah died in that room.”

The Hunter’s Ghost flicker slightly, ducking its tiny body like someone casting their gaze down. Cayde blinks very slowly, a conscious expressive. “Sorry to bring it up.”

“If your Hunters have breached the chamber then they avenge him even still.”

“You never saw what the bastards were doing back there?”

“No. I saw the Heart of Crota enter it once, but I did not know it to be a chamber, only a passage way I could never see clearly. The seals that locked it were too powerful for me to break even after years in Hive arcana. Toland, perhaps, could have breached the wards or two Warlocks engaged in ritual but not I. Besides that, I could never get near without the… spawn sensing my presence.”

“If it makes you feel better, they firebombed the place dead.”

“Light a spark in the dark. Leave none alive…”

“Catchy. You said the witch entered it once? Any reason why?”

“It was… after. When she left the room after she finished with Omar. That was the chamber she entered.” Cayde’s Ghost flinches again. Cayde doesn’t look away. “I never again saw her in that room. She only attended the spawn when there was… something to feed them.”

Cayde glances at his Ghost. “Did you happen to see what they did with Agah’s body?”

“A hallowed knight took possession of the corpse and carried it away, deeper into the crèche. I never found him, though I tried. I found Mota and Eriana, but Toland and Omar were lost. I never found even a trace of them in that place, nothing to take back to anyone who ever knew them.”

A beat.

“Hey, Eris. Have I ever told you you’re braver than me?”

“I don’t believe it for a moment, Cayde-6. But thank you.”

The Exo tilts his head again. “You know the King Killer Cadre was Omar’s cadre before he took with Sai Mota. They’re looking for him.”

“After all these years, there will be nothing to bury.”

“Yeah, but still. They’re looking. Armor don’t dust like we do.”

“He wore Gravebreaker gear. An Ahamkara bone gauntlet. A red fiberwire cloak.” She pushes it from her mind – the last instance she saw him. “I don’t remember what else. Please, if they find anything…”

“You’ll be the first, Eris.”

“Thank you. I wish I could say more.”

“Eh.” Cayde shrugs, bumping his Ghost who spins slightly, offended. “The Warlocks will figure it out. Ikora’s on it so one way or another, it’s getting solved. In the meantime, there’s nothing in that Temple that a few King Killers can’t handle. Place has been deserted since your pals killed its god.”

“A temporary lull. Oryx will answer one day so your Hunters are doing the necessary work.” A slight hesitation before she speaks again, a low tension of fear inside her, gently suppressed. “If need be, I can join them in the temple. If they need eyes, I have them to spare.”

“Nah. But I appreciate the offer, Eris. I’ll stop buggin’ ya and get back to it, but I’ll keep you looped in. Don’t work too hard out here.” He begins to wave, turning to walk off but stops. He lurches momentarily, like a man just remembering something forgot, then turns to look over his shoulder. His Ghost, still present, also peers at her, shyly, from behind his hood. “Y’know… I wish I’d been around in your day to see you hunt. Betcha we woulda gotten along.”

Eris smiles imagining such a different universe. “I think we would have.”

* * *

She dreams lucidly, at times, but it’s no relief.

_Oh_ , she thinks, as she watches the Heart flay Light , shivering, luminous, in a strip from Omar’s thigh, _I’m dreaming._ And then – as the pleasure-song rises from the witch, the foul wet nurse feeding her pupae on Omar’s cries – she thinks, C _rota is dead. He’s dead! They killed him with his own sword!_ Omar still screams, still bucks against the bone and fiber platform on which they’ve bound him, still convulses and pleads when the Heart carves a deeper tract from his belly to heart. _This is over! They’re avenged!_

She could wake up. She could stop this, take control of the night terror, will another outcome as she’s done so many times before – kill the Heart, pull Omar free, carry him into the light and in this world she keeps her promise. But the waking after such impossible fantasy comes too cruel. Usually, in her dreams, she simply kills him. The very least she could have done and failed to do. In her dreams she cuts his throat and, in blissful accomplishment, lets the swarm rip her apart.

But tonight, she dreams she holds the blade.

Agah lies there bare-faced, his slight frame shuddering, breathing the toxic Hive atmosphere. Alive somehow despite that. There is something wrong with his eyes – a swarming blackness behind them. She can see his breath like it’s frozen in the putrid air. She sets the tip of the blade against his stomach.

“ _Eris_.”

She pushes the point through his lower belly, feels the texture of the penetration – muscle, sinew, the jerk and animal convulsion of his body around the knife. The blade does not exist in this dimension – she knows this inherently, it exists just enough. Just enough to feel. He jerks, knees twitching up, instinctively trying to curl around the wound, but he’s pinned fast. She angles slightly, slowly, _pushes_ and he _screams_. When she cuts him, he screams louder – a gutted animal sound that goes on and on and he flares like a nova – dazzling, fusion, Light and pain. It’s beautiful, the sound he makes, the pitch and reverb of his screaming sets off chords in her, pulsing waves or vibrato and euphoria. She cuts him again for the crescendo, the tremble of tortured breath, the rabbit pulse of his heart. She strips an incandescent thread from his body, ripping it out by the root.

“ _Stop_.” She feels his agony like heroin, molecular and hot. His despair a long pull of morphine. “Please. Please _stop_.”

She cuts relentlessly into him, long bloodless wounds. He bleeds Light thick with psychic trauma, like slicing open a honeycomb poisoned with molasses. His voice tastes good. The unborn feed on the richness, the complex nutrient of a Guardian’s pain. Eventually, his screams stop being human, become mechanical, instinctive. Like someone playing a melody by rote. She tries to bring back the song, to teach him again, in fresh strokes deeper than before. She guts and skins the Light from his flesh, but even as she flays the brightness from his shell, he can’t articulate the notes.

_Empty,_ she says, when he goes silent. _Broken._

“Eris.”

It’s not Omar who speaks. She turns. Sai stands there in the room. She’s pale and beautiful, a wraith among the jittering swarm at her back. She’s missing her right arm from the elbow down. There’s a hole in her upper chest where Omnigul punched through the shiftwire, paramuscular plate, the delicate bars of her ribcage, and ripped her heart from her chest. The ghost stares at her from the shadow of her hood. Her eyes are gone. 

“You promised.”

“What did I promise?”

“It’s not appropriate.”

The sun is high over the mountains of Venus and Sai Mota is yawning. When she does the tattoos on her cheekbones pull and stretch slightly, scrunching when she wrinkles her nose. The Venusian air is warm, rising hot over the seas boiled with volcanic activity, the smell rising peppermint and akali from the deep orange tide. In the grass where they lay the wind wiffles across their hair. Sai keeps hers long, knotted and coiled into an inky princess braid – the only way to get it under her Sanction Six helmet.

“Eriana thinks it would increase our chances.”

“Eriana wants revenge.”

“Just because she has emotional stakes in this does not mean she’s wrong. We all have stakes. Crota unmade us. He destroyed us. And he lives yet while the Vanguard advise we do nothing, surrender our moon to their mechanizations. It’s wrong. You agree with me there.”

Sai heaves a sigh and leans back against Eris’ chest. “Yes.”

“I would not ask if I did not think it was important.”

“He’s my second.”

“I know.”

“My responsibility.”

“I know, Sai. She’s a Warlock. She doesn’t know. I stopped her didn’t I? She’s asked you and Tarlowe. Tarlowe’s accepted but it’s not her place to ask Agah. That’s up to you.” There’s a lull, the two Hunters sitting together enjoying the warmth and the peace only slightly eroded by what’s coming. The anticipation is two-fold – terror and thrill. Eris bends down to press her face against Sai’s neck. “I told her it’s not certain he would come.”

“You know he would. He’s a fool. Like you.”

Eris loops her arms more tightly around Sai’s slender shoulders, setting her chin into the woman’s hair. “But you like fools.”

“Cocky fools apparently.”

“The brave ones are always a bit idiotic.”

“ _You’re_ an idiot,” Sai grumbles.

“Will you ask?”

She sighs. “Promise me.”

“Promise what?”

“If it comes to a choice… you must choose my second.”

“It will not come to that.”

“But if it does.” Sai sits up, her shoulders straight, eyes forward. “You must swear it.”

Eris shakes her head. “Fine. If something happens, if things go wrong, if I can only save one of you, Sai Mota, I promise to save your –”

Sai spins and slams the jagged Acolyte bone up under Eris’ sternum, puncturing her heart like red fruit, bursting black insider her. “ _YOU PROMISED_!” Sai stabs her again and again, over and over. She stabs her so fast, so many times, an impossible number of times. Rotten fluid pours from the wounds, decomposed, stinking. Sai stabs her in the throat. “YOU LIED! YOU LIED TO US AND NOW YOU’RE DEAD LIKE WE ARE! YOU’RE DEAD! YOU’LL DIE FOR WHAT YOU DID!” Sai’s eyes are green novas, burning, blinding in her skull. Toxic light emits from her throat when she screams. “I KNOW YOUR NAME!”

Eris wakes up.

She doesn’t scream but lying in her bunk she shakes, skin lathed in sweat, her bones pulsing. Her teeth chatter. Her body aches. She exhales slow and her breath hangs cold in the air. Something brushes her face, her cheeks, like dust falling and she opens her third eye and sees it: Above her, Ikora’s protective wards are charred black, so corroded the paint and metal is flaking away, rotten. Even as she watches, the rust is spreading across the ceiling like a mold. Fumbling slightly, she thumbs her wrist comm active.

“Ikora.”

A pause, then. “Eris? What is it? What’s wrong?”

“Angry gods.”


	2. Chapter 2

“What did you see, Eris Morn?”

She breathes slowly. In and out. Peripherally her audience shifts. Impatient or uncertainly, a murmur to her left, a low machine hum to her right, the myriad whisper of shifting weight and armor and anxiety. The assembled Guardians carry their hopes and fears in the tides of their Light and to her they glow hot in the spectrum of her third eye – the eye that hungers and seeks. Zavala, the only Titan in the room, is a cacophony. His mood-noise quieter than most of his class, but nevertheless a constant discord among the quick hummingbird emotions of the Hunters and the low suppressed hum of the Warlocks.

Ikora Rey speaks again, gentle. “Eris?”

“I heard a voice speak to me through a facsimile of dream. It claimed to know my name. It claimed to come for me. In the voice was identity and what of me still walks in shadow knows the name.”

“You know who reached out to you?”

“I suspect.”

“Who?”

“Oryx.”

An immediate spike from those assembled, but emotional only. Discipline reigns. Only Ikora’s best mindbreakers and Cayde’s King Killer squad are present. Zavala has brought no Titans into this briefing. Eris does not need her third eye to read the wariness in how he comes here – suspicion tempered with disgust, but underlain now with the gravitas of fear. Fear because Eris has been right in her ravings before.

“How can you be sure?”

“There are none among you who know Hive abominations as I do. Their languages, their… knowing of certain truths – I am near to it. I know the names they speak without words. This is the name that burned itself into my dreamcatchers. What shadow reached me through the barriers was mere ghost, a flicker of his malice.”

“Or,” intones Zavala, “an echo of darkness past.”

“Are we not past your skepticism?” says Ikora sharply.

“No. And as a Warlock skepticism should be your forte.” His tone is not hostile, simply… tired. “Visions are not true intelligence. Nightmares are not actionable facts. I do not disagree that Oryx will be on the move and the Hive will seek revenge, but what value is a premonition of what’s known?”

“An opening shot in a war is not indicative as to the pace and tempo of a coming conflict?” Ikora’s tone could chill liquid nitrogen.

“Prove then that it is a shot and not simply…” He seeks a word that is not ‘madness’. “Not simply nightmares.”

“Many voices speak in the dark,” says Eris, conceding to the Titan’s caution. “Many singing horrors. I hear them in myriad and so ask the patience of Abyssal Seers.” She inclines her head to the four Warlocks standing with Ikora, garbed in black feildweave, their faces banded in black war paint and runic scripts. Two of them are human. One an Exo. The third and eldest an Awoken woman who inclines her head back. “I ask for a liminal divination.”

The Seers do not react. They already knew, but the Exo says, “Are you certain that is what you want, Eris Morn?”

“I am prepared.”

“Alright,” says Cayde. “So you need Warlocks for seein’ what’s bumping in the dark. But any particulars for why my Hunters been called from the field?” Cayde is standing in such a way that his body is between Eris and the three King Killers behind him. The Hunter trio glance amongst themselves. “Can’t see how we’re linked to this.”

“Eris Morn knows the way of it, Cayde-6.” It’s the Awoken Abyssal that speaks. “Your Hunters have been, recently, in the darkest of the Hive’s ritual chambers. That is grounding. A link. They have passed through darkness and still carry its energies. You.” She points to the fireteam leader, a hunter woman in a ragged cloak and armor. “You’ve brought something from the chamber. Will you permit me to see?”

The woman glances at Cayde first. He nods and only then does she step forward. From a hip satchel she produces something, a dirty brown scrape of cloth. She starts to hand it to the Warlock then stops, pulling it back almost against her heart. She looks at Eris.

“It’s red fiberwire.”

A cold pain in her belly, nausea. Eris nods. “Omar wore red when we descended.”

“He was my second before he was Mota’s. This cloak was the one I gave him. He followed her into that Pit.”

“I know, Aly Iona.”

“Ikora will not tell me how he died.”

“Will my telling you give you peace?”

“No. Tell me anyway.”

A moment for Eris to manage the pain, then, “He died in their hands. They tortured him. They stripped his Light like flesh and fed it to the swarm. I did nothing. He died before me.”

Aly stands, swaying slightly, the scrape of cloth in her fist. The fire within her flares, burns, then burns down. She loosens her hand and gives the shorn scrap to the Abyssal who accept it in upturned palms, cupping it gently. In the background, Ikora exhales, a breath she’s been holding all while Aly spoke. In the quiet that follow, Eris steps forward into the middle of the room and removes her shoulder guards and chest armor, setting it aside while the Warlock pass the small token of cloth amongst them, each cupping it gently, the fabric rippling with unseen transfusions of power.

Wearing only her headgear, a soft tunic, trousers, and boots, Eris takes a seat on the floor.

One of the Warlocks gestures and the worn stone circles in the floor flicker purple, a ring of Void Light looping into the shallow trenches until she is ringed in mauve fire. Ikora is last to take the token and first to kneel outside the circle before Eris. Her eyes catch the Void glow, amber brown sparked with violet and worry. The other Warlocks take position while the Hunters back into the corners well away. Zavala remains near, his presence a fixed point, steady as a gravity well. Oddly… reassuring.

“We could find another way,” says Ikora, gently.

“But no quicker way.”

“No.” Regret in her voice, a resignation. “I suppose not.”

Eris inhales, exhales, and Ikora extends one hand, rippling invisibly with Light, the cloth wavering in her palm as though a heat mirage. Eris stretches her hand, hesitating just before contact, her fingers waving over the ripple of connection. The red cloth, dirty and blackened, a glitter of the red it once was and in that all the horror encompassed.

She whispers. “Were it any other than him.”

“Remember it is all nightmare. Not true.”

“To them, pain is _joy_. Have I said that? Have I told you that?”

“Yes. Eris, you don’t have to –”

She takes Ikora’s hand in hers, feels the shock of the Light as it enters her skin to skin, a brief and terrible euphoria and then –

“I just don’t see how Warlocks put up with it.”

Omar has something between his teeth, a brightly colored stick of caramelized sugar. No one on the Tower sells such little luxuries, meaning that he went down into the City and bought them. Eris looks around, carefully. The sun is warm against her back through the unregulated fieldweave fabric of her armor, her old armor. Her cloak is folded on the ground beside her, a cold drink and wax paper folding a small pastry inside. She can smell oil and cooked beef with onion. They are all seated atop a long flat of stone jutting from a hillside is sun-warm beneath her and below them are the walls of the City, the urban sprawl cloistered behind them.

“I mean, it sounds so noisy, right? In their heads?”

“Shh,” says Sai who lies like a cat beside her.

She presses one finger to her lips, ungloved, the pressure against her mouth gentle as a kiss and Eris resists the desperation in her to lean down and make it so. But in this memory she did no such thing. She did not panic, did not feel the scream rise in her, did not throw herself onto the woman and hold her so tightly that reality might not wrest her away. She did not do that. She remembers this day so long past and what she said was:

“Why do you want to learn from Sai, Gunslinger?”

Omar grins over his shoulder at her. “Cuz I’m already the best at what I do in my cadre. Needed to learn something new and Mota’s the best.”

“Shh,” says Sai again. 

“Hey, Morn, will you teach me that thing with the –” He waves his hand ambiguously.

“Oh,” Eris says, the words drawn from her like string from her throat, “I don’t know if you’ve got the disposition for that.”

“He doesn’t,” says Sai, her eyes still closed.

“Aw, c’mon, boss.”

“Still too undisciplined,” says Sai, serene, her fingers knitted over her stomach. “Learn knifework first. Then the tricks.”

“But –”

“Shh.”

“She’s the zennest blader I ever met,” says Omar in defeat. “I’m gonna die before she teaches me anything even to do with the Arc.”

“Learn it right or do not learn,” says Sai.

“I’m trying!”

“There is no ‘try’,” says Sai, still not sitting up. She waves one hand, mysteriously.

Omar makes a horrible face for Eris’ benefit and she smirks, then stands up. “I can show you a conduit technique, for meditation and practice.”

“Ugh. How do you guys meditate so much? Don’t you just… _feel_ it?”

“You can only go on instinct alone so long.” Eris nudges Sai with her toe, grins when Sai’s lips curl knowingly. Eris stands next to Sai and reaches out toward the Gunslinger, indicating he come to her. He cocks his head, intrigued. “Give me your hands, Agah. And stop whining.”

“I’m not whining,” he whines, bouncing from his seat to stand across from her. He lays his hands palm to palm with hers. “Okay, now what?”

Eris smiles. “Close your eyes.”

He squints, suspicious, then does so.

Sai immediately grabs his ankle and zaps him with a bit of Arc Light at the same instant Eris grabs his wrists and does the same. Omar yells and tries to blink hard to the left, but Eris’ Light lashes him molecularly in-place, magnetic pull grounding him inescapably in the circuit of her electricity. Sai lunges up, grabbing her protégé at the ribs, digging in Arc-static fingers so he screams and laughs simultaneously, swearing, lit up with low-grade Light. The most brutal of tickling attacks.

“FUCK YOU GUYS! FUCK YOU! BLADER CHEATS!”

Their Ghosts are laughing, winking at their Guardians from overhead.

“Break the circuit!” Eris laughs. “Use your Light.”

“I can’t!”

“I can’t!” Sai cajoles, mockingly, but mercifully stops her attack. Eris lets go too. Omar immediately lunges at his mentor but Sai blinks away and then they’re both gone, darting around the surrounding crop of trees, the fleeting sound of Sai’s laughter in the forest. The trio if Ghosts continue to blink merrily, circling like excited hummingbirds over the scene. Eventually Agah gives up the chase and blinks back into existence on the cliff beside Eris, slightly out of breathe and scowling.

“You two are the worst,” he says. “You’re the –“

_“Eris.”_

She looks over her shoulder, but no one’s there.

_“Eris, wake up. This isn’t –”_

Eris wakes. Ikora is still crouched before her, gripping her hand, the token still pressed hot between their palms. It’s gained a heat of its own. Like holding a piece of foil hot from the sun. The other Warlocks stand at the perimeter of the circle, eyes closed, focusing. Ikora’s body blurs, a mirage of Light.

“Eris, we need to go deeper than that. Than memory. Are you ready?”

“Did you see it?”

“Yes. I saw them.”

“So bright,” she says in wonder.

“As you’ve always said.” There’s a pain in Ikora’s voice. “Are you ready?”

Eris nods, feels the flash of fresh power surge up her arm, penetrating like a molecular point through the brain and for a moment the pain is extreme, unbearable, she begins to–

Sai screams.

Eris turns in time to see the blade fall. The hallowed knight roars and swings, sword cleaving Mota’s body open from shoulder to pelvis, splitting her like a red fruit upon the temple steps. The hewn pieces peel apart and fall separately as her Ghost flickers, blinking in panic, its tiny eye bright and terrified under the skies of the moon. Eris cannot move, her feet rooted to the lunar stone. The Ghost cries out, spiraling up. It flies. Straight into the snatching claws of Verok Eir Spawn. The witch sings. She splits the Ghost open with her thumbs, cracking its shell like a walnut. She raises the screaming frame to her lipless maw and sucks the Light from the rind.

_That’s not right. It wasn’t her. It wasn’t her that Verok felled._

Vell screams. He’s held fast by two knights at the doors of the temple. Mountainous, armored, they each collar an arm while the thrall claw open the Titan’s armor like paper mache, shredding the plasteel open to the fieldweave suit, ripping through the armor into flesh. His helmet is shattered, the visor blown open so she can see his face, contorted and bloody, the electric Awoken blue of his eyes like lanterns in the ruin. The thrall hang onto his legs, weighing them down, forcing him still as they pull him apart. The thrall tear his belly open, ripping red and –

“No! No he died differently. It wasn’t like this!”

Eris turns away, tried to disconnect her eyes but they see ceaselessly. Vell writhes, screaming even as the thrall dig his lungs from the cage of his torso and as he chokes finally he bursts into flame. The shell burns away, the Holdfast Type 3 armor, the flesh, sears away like tissue paper before a blow torch and Eriana-3 stands burning in his place. She thrashes. Her legs from the knees down have melted and fused into a molten slag, rooting her to the stone.

She screams and scrabbles at herself, the flames of her own Solar Light devouring and burning her. Her armor and clothes have incinerated away so she stands a writhing black mannequin of flame. None of the Hive touch her, but stand around her, watching the heat blow her systems apart, ligaments and Exo plating popping and warping in the unfathomable heat. She shrieks as the filaments in her eyes explode, her left arm melting and falling from its socket, her jaw disconnecting and swinging loose. The beautiful titanium architecture of her face fuses and melts into a single bubbling mass of metal, her screams muffled to insane moaning. She claws at her own face, ripping it off in sticky semi-liquid chucks.

The Hive look on, silent, enraptured. Witches are singing. Eris realizes she, herself, is singing as her best friend burns alive, until she’s nothing but a living stump of metal, burning on and on like an oil well caught aflame.

“It didn’t happen like this!” Eris covers her eyes, all of them. She cannot block out the sound.

Someone touches her shoulder.

“Eris?”

She dares to look.

Omar is lying in the dark beside her.

She’s on the floor somehow, her head pillowed on her arm, looking at him like she’d laid down beside him on the grass beyond the City walls. It’s dark and quiet. There are bones under her, layers and layers of them, still resonating with the deaths and desecration of their ancient owners. Maggot-ridden fluid glues the remains, bubbling, the worms defecating bio-mass. The room bristles with thrall, curled like animals in hibernation and above them the cursed Wizards rove in dozens, chittering and hissing.

“Eris? Is it you?”

She’s not sure, but she says, “Yes.”

Omar wears no armor or rather, his armor is so deteriorated it – No. It’s not deteriorated; it’s somehow rotted into his skin, black seams like surgical wounds where it’s grown into the bones struts of his ribs – in the holes in his tunic she can see the joining. The Ahamkara bone gauntlet sinks into his arm, fused into his shoulder and seems to be, in some way, coming alive – regenerating new black flesh. There’s something wrong with his eyes. The whites shine translucent and inside the orbs black threads writhe and surge. He’s hyperventilating. There are particles in his breathe, like he’s breathing out the ash of his desiccated lungs.

“Help me.” When he speaks she can see the needles and blood that fill his mouth. His face is still human enough to convey the agony of the transformation. “Help me. _Please_.”

Eris pulls away from its touch. “You are not Omar Agah.”

“Don’t say that. It’s me.”

“What are you?”

“I’m Omar. I’m Omar, please, believe me.”

The thing that is not Omar shudders as it speaks. The horror clutches itself, the flesh rotted from the fingers to cancerous bone. Opaque fumes issue from its throat, like flame. Its face blackens, the texture of flesh giving way to solid smoke and even as it speaks, its eyes burst in their sockets, birthing a sluice of black fluid and gas. The creature screams, agonized. Clutching its eyes, the abomination sobs in Hive multi-tones.

“Omar Agah died in the tunnels!” Eris cannot look away. “At the hands of Crota’s Heart!”

The monster screams, a mad despairing howl. It reaches for her, one palsied hand. Its entire upper body is devoured in black smog, ashes flaking limbs rotting to dust. Its eyes shine like novas, white-green and impossibly bright. It screams and screams, a horrific sound. Like a child set on fire. It is burning from within, a terrible emerald flame sparking in its heart. It screams in Omar’s voice as the last of its fetid flesh flakes away into ash and nothing but a black shadow, burning, and crying, remains.

“I’m still him!”

_“Eris, wake up!”_

The Wizards are descending now, reaching for it – for him. “Help me! Eris!”

_“Eris, wake up!”_

He strains for her and only then does she see – his legs are nailed at the ankles to the floor. He cries, “Don’t leave me with them!”

Eris begins to reach for him, her fingers almost touching –

_“ERIS!”_

Ikora has her hands on her shoulders. She is lit up from within, a lantern filled with Light, a sun breaking. This time, Eris reaches for her, her palm eclipsing the shine like a shadow over a star. It takes her a moment to realize she’s got her hand cupped to the Warlock’s jaw, that her other hand is gripping her sleeve so tight her knuckles strain white. She registered this: Ikora’s fear. The stink in the room, like rotting, like burned sugar, like ion, the frission of spent Light. That Cayde-6 has his hand on Aly Iona’s shoulder. The way the Abyssal Warlocks are staring wordlessly at her.

“Did you see it?” Eris says. Her own voice sounds alien to her. “Did you see the shadows on the wall? Their origin?”

“Eris…”

“Was it real?

“Eris. I – I don’t –”

“Tell me, was it real? What we saw. That last horror, was it _real_?”

Ikora cannot seem to speak. Eris can still hear it – the screaming and scraping, chittering, so loud in her mind now, louder than its ever been. Deafening. Eventually, it’s Cayde who breaks the silence.

“Why’s it always the Hunters,” he says, “that these undead fucks take to shadow?”


	3. Chapter 3

“This is literally the worst idea you have ever brought before me.”

Ikora says this with profound sincerity, with the intensity of a Warlock performing great ritual, the atomic foci of her attention fixed somewhere in the middle regions of Cayde’s skull where she must wish, vaguely, to divine the strange machinations of the Exo’s terrible, honestly, just _awful_ ideas. Cayde-6 seems primarily unaffected. No. He seems… further motivated. Energized by the scope of Ikora’s mounting exasperation. The part of Eris that was Hunter, however hollowed and distant now, still feels a faint cant of glee but that remains far from where she stands now, listening to the Vanguard argue action.

“You said grounding. You said stuff links to stuff. That thing’ll take us straight to anything Yor, right?”

“It is not,” enunciates Ikora laboriously, “that simple.”

“So I’m wrong? It won’t work.”

“No, it will… it will work but not without risk, without cost, without –”

“Without Eris here as a third point to triangulate a location in an eighth-tier scrying ritual?”

Cayde has a masterful control over his limited expressions and manages to bat his luminous Exo eyes innocently at Ikora who, through unfathomable will power, does not reach out and choke the younger Hunter Vanguard. Zavala, standing at Ikora’s left, brings a single gloved hand up and directly into his face. Having survived yet another sentence across from her, Cayde presses forward, less aggravating now – his tone takes hard right toward serious.

“Look, Rey, I got all kinds of understanding for not wanting to fuck with the damn thing, but you said it yourself. It’s another Yor.”

“I literally did not ever say such a thing.”

“Details.”

Ikora gazes at Cayde and through a very slight tightening in her jaw, conveys the details of his imminent demise via shotgun.

“You did say I’m not wrong.”

Ikora looks at Eris. “And you’ve sided with him on this? There is no persuading you?”

“In this instance,” says Eris, carefully, “I must side as a Hunter.”

 _Not,_ she doesn’t say, _as one of your Hidden_.

“What we saw in the divination…” Ikora hesitates, seems to steel herself and goes on. “It may have been mere horror, a fiction to lure you. However unspeakable, however real it may have seemed, there is no truly telling if it was vision, echo, or illusion.”

Eris, softly, says, “And if it is not illusion, then I abandon him a third time to torment.”

“What if he is the monster you seek?”

“Then I will do as I should have done the moment I saw him living among their number.”

And at that, Ikora has no words she can give. 

“You realize,” says Zavala, slowly, annoyed, “that it will require a unanimous vote of the Vanguard to bring the cursed weapon from its place.”

Cayde stares at Zavala. “And if it were one of your Titans?” He tilts his head. Cayde speaking softly carries a strange and terrible weight, like a loaded weapon, a shot in the chamber. “If it were Shaxx or a new forge, you’d leave ‘em lie?” When Zavala closes his eyes, he goes on, “No. You carry your wounded out, you kill those that need killin’, you do right by your own. Hunter out there needs some kinda bullet and I aim to give it to him, but you won’t gimme yur vote cuz you’re scared of a gun with no master? That what Hunters are to you? You leave us to hang?”

“You’re the Hunter Vanguard,” says Zavala, levelly. “You of all people –”

“Yeah,” snaps Cayde, “me of all people. You think I don’t know what the thing is or what it means? The history it’s got? The blood? Zavala, I like you, you know, most days but you say somethin’ like that to me again and I think we’ll have more than words.”

“Stoppit,” says Ikora. Her hand is on Zavala’s shoulder. “I can perform the ritual. I will need to gather a few things, materials, volunteers to aid with the casting.” She shakes her head. “I think we should take a slower path but if Eris agrees… then you have my vote.”

Cayde tosses up his hands. “Thank the fuckin’ Light. Let’s get this show on the road.”

Zavala barks. “You want to bring the Thorn from lock up so you can chase a phantom. This is what you ask.” Cayde already has his back to Zavala, having turned to go and now looks back over his shoulder, the gleam of his optics two low-watt carbuncles in the shadow of his hood. Zavala speaks slow. “Are Morn’s visions so compelling? So urgent they we set aside preparation for war to pursue – at best, if this is not all delusion – some kind of mercy killing? Is this _right_?”

Cayde spins around. “ _Yes_ , _Light damn you_!”

The silence after that deafens.

Eventually: “You have my vote, Cayde.”

When Cayde leaves the room, Ikora indicates with a flicker of her eyes that Eris should follow and so she does. The Exo Hunter does not react to her tailing him, only continues his brisk pace to the courtyard, head up, hood up, a heat coming off him like an engine. Eriana-3 was constantly that way – running hot, running angry. By the time they reach the Tower plaza it’s evening. A fireteam, stinking of battle, high off survival, is drinking in the grass near Banshee’s workstation. Under the single giant tree that grows there.

Their laughter carries from the tree trunk where they’ve congregated in the fallen leaves.

Cayde stops on the steps near the front of promenade, his right boot almost touching the letters engraved there. ATRVUM PROPVGNATORVM. In the past, she knelt on these stones, kissed her fingers and pressed them to the words. After Mare Imbrium, after Wei Ning fell, the Moon fell, after so _many_ fell. That day seems an eternity ago. Cayde-6 unholsters a blade from his thigh.

“Sorry about the trouble there. Knew they’d pitch a fit, didn’t think they’d get that glitched about it. Oh well. Just a year left on my bid anyhow. Sides, Big Blue doesn’t actually hold a grudge, generally, he’s good people like that.” He’s flipping the knife blindingly fast, up and down, a silver blur. His gaze is beyond the edge of the Tower plaza, toward the City or the Traveler. “Shaxx though, that guy will smile kill you a century later for some shit you said back in the day. Yessiree.”

“Thank you for your assistance in this. It was… unexpected.”

“Wow, you aint been a Hunter in a long time if you thought I wouldn’t back your play on this. Or maybe I really did give you that vibe. Shame on me I guess.”

“You were never so compelled to help me before.”

He shrugs. “You hadn’t killed Crota before.”

“I did not kill Crota.”

“Details.”

Eris empathizes with Ikora in that moment. “You feel such responsibility for a Hunter you never met?”

“Aly Iona aint dead, but it sure is killing her thinking about this and she’s good people too. Her second, I hear, he was the best of people. Prolly why the Hive are digging you with what happened to him. It’s what they do.” A beat. “I’ll be honest, I’m just real sick of Hunters bein’ left. That’s all. Long tale’a woe following that stupid handcannon and I’m angling toward the notion it doesn’t get to keep its legacy. I aim to end its fuckin’ line.”

“You’ll go?”

“Oh, hell no.” He grins at her, Exo-bright and radiating. “I just used up all my good will for the rest of my term. No way I’ll be let out to do this myself.”

“So…”

“You got your shot at cleaning this up, Morn. You good with that?”

“Yes.”

He doesn’t hesitate. He offers her a hand to shake and she, cautiously, takes it. Cayde suppresses a shiver when she touches him, but she feels in in the flux of his Light – the recession, like a poked nerve recoiling from something too cold to bear. He still shakes her hand though and that will be, she knows, as close as he comes to apologizing for the day she came, a Hunter, ruined and alone… and it was the Warlock Vanguard who took her under wing. 

“Good luck, Morn.”

***

“It’s malice survives even now, Eris.”

“I have only heard legend. I knew… that it had been recovered from the wild.”

“Shin Malphur. The rogue Guardian. He only ever came once to the City and only because his Ghost told him to. He couldn’t destroy it himself, you see. He tried but in the end he brought it here.”

“Why didn’t he bring it immediately?”

“Because he didn’t trust the Vanguard. He didn’t trust us to destroy it” She sighs. “He was right in that regard.”

“Why do you keep it?”

“For matters such as this. By all rights, it should be destroyed, but it is a weapon that can turned if the will is right. I weapon for a time of greatest peril. It should never be lightly unsealed.”

“This is not lightly.”

“I know. I also know since the moment you entered the room, it’s changed.”

Eris looks again upon the weapon. They stand four levels deep into the Abyssal Vaults, past seven sigils cast by seven Warlocks of the seventh tier. Abyssals all, marked by the Aberrant Seal. The air tastes like void. Is that possible? Eris feels it in her molecules, the vibrato of atomic intention – the stones themselves bitter with the restraint. A crush of dark matter in waiting as she and Ikora observe the weapon that felled legends.

“You say it’s changed?”

“Yes. The… core. It’s stirred.”

The cursed gun lies on a pedestal, a waist-high pillar carved with blue seal work. A shimmer of Void, like a Defender’s shield, lies over it in a sheet. Were she to touch it, Ikora has said, it would strip her fingers of their flesh and atomize the small bones in her hand. Contact, she assures her, isn’t needed. Proximity is more than enough. Peering through the protective veil, Eris can see strange light pulsing from within the muzzle and shining out from the cracks and pits in the handgun’s heavy architecture. As if sensing her eyes upon it, the core pulses again, green, like the heart of a very great thing waking.

Eris says, “It is just a weapon.”

“It’s more than that.” Ikora folds her arms, her eyes narrowed, spine taut. “It is not known if he found the weapon, made the weapon, or some measure of the two, but the man who became Dredgen Yor was subsumed by the dark current that runs through this gun. Do not underestimate an object for being an object.” She glances at the once Hunter beside her. “A bomb is just a bomb until it enacts its purpose.”

“Noted.”

Ikora’s gaze becomes heavy, a warm cloak over cold-weary shoulders. “Eris…”

“Please.” She holds up a hand. “Please, do not persuade me from my path. You will succeed and I will never have peace.”

“It is a trap, you know.” Her eyes in the dim lighting seem to have their own amber phosphorescence. “There are means of obfuscation available to practitioners of Hive magic. If they sought to hide themselves, to prevent your finding them, they would not leave… holes, to speak, in their defense. No. They leave small, specific, mathematical imperfections in their casting so that you and only you may pass through and only with great suffering.

When Eris doesn’t answer, Ikora goes on.

“If this is our enemy, then this torturous course is one he invites you to walk purely to hurt you.”

“And you would advise a slower path? To ignore the open door, look for another route?”

“I would not walk into an ambush openly laid. Your enemy means you harm.”

“I know harm. I know what harm one can inflict upon themselves and I know this: Oryx underestimates me.”

Ikora moves to touch her but stops, her hand warded away and she closes her eyes. “Every step is a horror, Eris. I will bear it with you this time at least. I can walk this way with you as I could not when I sent you into the dark.”

“I sent myself, Ikora. This is something you will need to understand one day. You merely gave me reason to come back.”

Ikora’s face does something odd, a small pain crossing into it, then smoothed away.

“Then knowing I cannot, despite your say so, persuade you from this – let’s begin. Raise your hand toward the weapon.” Eris does so, feels Ikora move to stand behind her, a heat of Light from her palms as she reaches from behind Eris to gently cup her elbow with one hand, supporting her extended arm. “There are fourteen Warlocks standing sentinel at fourteen sigil ley points throughout the bunker. We are not truly alone.” Her other hand she raises near Eris’ face, near her eyes, not quite touching. A hovering question. “Over your forehead. Are you ready?”

_No._

“Yes.”

Ikora gingerly places her other palm against Eris’ brow. This time what comes rises gradually, a pressure in her skull swelling out from the center of her thoughts. Eris remains steady, weathering the climbing throb of pain, pulsing like wound, like a heartbeat. The Thorn, she knows without looking, pulses in time to the pain. Ikora grips her elbow hard. Had her arm begun to dip? The hand against her forehead burns now, a sheet of hot tinfoil pressed tight to her skin, searing inwards. 

“Stay with me,” Ikora says. “Stay with me now.”

Her skull is cracking open surely. Some terrible thing is birthing itself from the eggshell of her cranium. She resists the scream in her throat, resists it, the noise behind her teeth and on her tongue. It tastes like blood. It smells like gun powder, like the heat off metal after a shot. Tastes like copper and rot. Smells like ash. Her eyes are burning. All three of them inflamed marbles of hot metal searing deep into their sockets as her teeth super heat and shatter. Ikora’s palm: a burning slab from a cherry red flame. She opens her mouth and –

_The shot catches him high on the shoulder, punches through, the impact spinning his whole body in the morning sun. The red spray catching the first beams of dawn over the dunes of Mars, shafts of yellow razored in sheets through the ruined scaffolding. Smells like blood. Smells like metal. His scream has a taste she can swallow. The Hunter clutches his arm at the shoulder, the dirty gray of his cloak running suddenly red, the flower blooming from the point of penetration. Like a rose._

_He pants. Flickers. A mirage-blurred step, there and gone._

_The legendary shadow show. The thought of killing him – it courses arousal, anticipation. Sand shifting, micro vibrations in the city ruins, the structural beams and crumbing walls transmitting softly and betraying his position. No matter if he can vanish, if he’s got a Blader’s shift and an assassin’s blink-strike speed. There’s no trick he knows that she doesn’t share. Even now comes a vision of him: an impression, somewhere, crouched behind a wall, he struggles to breath, pulls his crushed helm off and sucks air, his Ghost whispering soothingly as panic fragments the delicate arrangement of thought._

_“We need to run. Can you listen to me?” A nudge, a blue light, tucked behind his ear, inside the hood of his cloak. “It’s too strong. It’s hunting us. It moves like us. Don’t face that thing.”_

_“Can’t,” he rasps. Coughs. “It burns. Ghost. I’m burning…”_

_“It’s the round. From that weapon. It resists healing.”_

_“Hurts.”_

_“Just hold on.”_

_Shakily grabs for the machine gun in the sand beside him. It chirps softly, “One magazine left. I’m with you.”_

_“We’re with you. Now run!”_

_Credit to the rabbit-heart Hunter: his shots find their mark but not in flesh so affected. The culmination of a three day hunt ends in the heart of the Freehold transit center, two levels down in the darkness where the Guardian’s innate sense of direction puts three Arc-charged blades directly through her breastbone… into nothing the Light can harm. He’s shocked when you drink the Light from the metal. When you lick it from the blade like honey. He resorts back to standard weaponry then – a machine gun of his own design, an artificial mind that tickles in the brain._

_The magazine runs dry._

_Her prize catches him in the thigh, a round punches into the thigh just above the knee cap (no running now) and he goes down a second time, flame igniting through the living current of his Light, setting the air around him briefly brilliantly ablaze in the darkness. This time he screams, thrashes in the sand, trying to smother the heat from the shot. The empty machine gun cries for its Guardian until she crushes the frame, kicks it into the darkness. Credit: the Hunter throws three waves of ionic Arc flame before her next shot blows the ligaments in his wrist apart, sets his bones burning in the marrow._

_“Pahanin Errata.”_

_Hood’s slid off, can see his face even in the dark subway tunnels – eyes like old jade, skin earthy as the planet he’s dying on, battle paint bright blue ink black hair, long, braided into a tail. There’s blood on his face. There’s ash on his skin. Scars – unhealed by a Ghost’s interference – evidence of Vex energy shots near missed. Evidence of a fight he can’t remember. Legendary and forgotten as Kabr the Legionless. Blood pulses steadily from the shredded hole in his wrist, so torn the cauterized arteries still gush._

_Her weapon hums, aching for the final shot._

_“I know your voice.” Errata’s got an accent. Or maybe that’s the fear._

_“It’s likely.”_

_The next shot hits him in the gut , punches through the Cold Mantis 2.3.0 model just below the sternum and sets him on fire again, so hot his armor chars, his cloak curls and smokes at the edges. He doesn’t scream through, just lies shuddering, teeth bared in a scream he doesn’t voice, digging his arms up to the elbow in red sand. The red’s in the dust and on his tongue. When the spasm passes, Errata closes his eyes, covers his ears, childishly, whispering._

_“Not alone. Not alone. Not alone. Not alone…”_

_“I suppose. If your Ghost dies with you.” She can feel the Ghost. Hiding in the sub-space between dematerialization and physical manifestation – an untouchable half-collection of molecules and Light and agony. It is no doubt in pain as its Guardian is in pain but too battle-disciplined to reconstruct and make a target of itself. “I know Ghosts choose that, when they lose their Guardians. Others… abandon the shell.” She aligns her prize with the Hunter’s skull, savors the euphoria, the anticipation. “I wonder what yours will do when your Light is gone.”_

_Pahanin vanishes. The next shot hits sand, glassing the dune on impact._

_There is a reason Errata is legend._

_He flickers. He appears. Flickers again. Appears. Flickers. So fast the shadows he leaves seem alive and she shoots the shadows. She shoots seven shadows before the real Errata blinks from nowhere, faster than even she can follow, and hooks his injured arm around her neck from behind. A killing embrace. He slams a knife into her back and breaks a blade off in her spine, cracking silver between two lumbar vertebra. Smells like blood, like sweat, like adrenaline and dying. He’s so close to death now, his Ghost ready to revive him but only if –_

_He gasps when she grabs his forearm and yanks him off her back, holds him hanging aloft for an instant._

_“I am more than that now, Hunter.”_

_She pins him in the sand, wrists nailed to the ground by his head. His Light burns in him. He electrifies instantly, his whole body erupting into a blue-white conduit, arcs of electricity snapping, flashing, tongues of blue Light licking fire across the sand, super heating and to red hot, melting glassing the alien earth beneath him. The Arc Light doesn’t hurt. It doesn’t burn or electrify. It tethers in blinding blue bands from Pahanin to her, like a thunderhead discharging into the ground over and over, unstoppably. It’s unbearable. The pleasure of it, the Light diffusing through her and becoming… other._

_She is a lightning rod, conducting, then pulling the Light out at its source. One hand at Errata’s throat. The other trapping his uninjured wrist, she drains the Light from his body one pull, one swallow of lightning at a time. He screams with every surge. She can feel the limits to his Light, the reservoir draining and coming final emptiness. Eventually, he cannot scream, only shudder in time to every long rope of lightning she pulls from his body. She eats the Light from him until he’s nothing – a jerking doll, a toy that arches under her, bleeding Light, agony, and despair._

_“Tell me how Kabr died.” He’s beyond moving now so she fits her hands to his jaw, lifts his head so he must look her in the eye. “You witnessed it, Errata. The only survivor from the Vault. Did he really send you out or did you leave him to die in that tomb? Did you run to save yourself, Pahanin?”_

_His face contorts briefly. “No…”_

_“They say only you two entered the Vault, but you say that’s both true and untrue.”_

_“I won’t… tell…”_

_“Is it preferable to die or to have never lived?” She’s got the last of his Light now, a thin arc of it between them, heart to heart and beating in time to his artificial pulse. His eyes flicker, reflecting the final breath of the Traveler still tied to him. “You may not remember, but this is true: He died alone.”_

_“Ghost.”_

_“Like you will die alone.”_

_“Ghost?”_

_“It cannot hear you now. It’s Light is gone. The last of it, see now? In my hand? It’s dead and you’re alone with me.”_

_“Remember… you. From before.” He’s in pain, the words killing him to speak, but he speaks anyway. He lifts one hand, shaking, nerveless, brushes fingertips to her cheekbone. She can see the green glow of her own eyes reflected in his. “Stood on the Wall that day. You said –”_

_She shoots him again, in the chest, just to the left of his heart. When he cries out, she he extinguishes him, rips the last of his Light like a plant rooted in the musculature of his heart. The agony comes sudden and all encompassing, so total he grasps at her shoulders clutches to stop her or for comfort or both. And in the instant where he goes dark, the precise moment of death, there is nothing in the universe but her, him, and the indescribable joy._

_She cracks open the Hunter’s armor, shreds his cloak (the geometric pattern of his cadre), begins the ritual she knows by instinct to desecrate what little remains of the Guardian. She is not the hero from the Wall who said beautiful things to a Hunter in a crowd. Her true name is –_

Eris wakes because someone slaps her so hard she tastes blood. She sees white, then she sees Ikora. The Guardian Vanguard is holding her down, one fist in the cloth over her breastbone, sitting in the middle of her chest. The Warlock’s brow is dripping, sweat beaded on her dark brown skin, running down her neck. Her cheeks gleam wetly.

“That’s enough!” she says, throat raw, like she’s been shouting.

“Ikora. What are you –?”

“Tell me your name!”

“What?”

“Tell me your name _right now_!”

“Eris Morn.”

“Again.”

“My name is Eris Morn. Risen in the third year of the Five Year Cull on Mars. I trained under Vikara Set, second in command of the Vibrant Mind cadre. I fought at Mare Imbrium. I saw the The Great Disaster and the death of Wei Ning the Titan at the hands of Crota; she led the first of the many to die. She died still trying to strike down the monster that killed her. In her name and those of the dead, I followed Eriana-3 of the Praxic Order into the heart of the moon with four others. They were lost. I was a Guardian. I guided a fireteam of six to finish what I could not. Crota is dead because of them. My name is Eris Morn. I am trying to find Omar Agah. I am still your friend. Ikora…”

The Warlock lowers her hand – the one full of Void, a fist full of black hole, ready in that instant to punch through Eris’ chest and extinguish whatever remained in her if she’s answered wrongly. Then Ikora covers her face and, shakily, exhales.

* * *

Eris Morn's ship is gone the next day. The kinder-Gauardians are puzzled at her sudden departure. Those with outstanding bounties, mildly annoyed by it.

When asked about her possible return to the Tower, Ikora Rey is noncommittal, mildly standoffish. "She's not bound to the City. I am not her keeper, Guardian."

They aren't particularly satisfied with that answer, but eventually the questions stop.

She's working late, hunched in the library when someone says, "You're right you know." 

"Cayde, desist in sneaking up on me."

"Ah, you knew I was there."

"I do not _always_ know you are there. I've killed you by accident on three separate occasions. You really-"

"Yeah, yeah." Cayde drifts around to sit on the books open at her elbow. "I mean, you're not her keeper."

"She's my friend, Cayde."

"Right." He taps on the desk. "But... she's also a Hunter."

"Cayde-"

"Ain't sayin' it to be a comfort. Sayin' because it's true."

"Omar Agah is not alive. Or if he is... he's not for saving."

"Sure. Either way, that's hers to do."

Ikora looks up, finally, from her books into Cayde's calm exo-rigid face. He's got a very expressive face most days. Not just then. 

"She won't come back, Cayde. She'll die in darkness, digging for his corpse. I am allowed to be horrified by this fact."

"Ain't a fact 'til it is." Cayde hops off her desk. "I'll bet you money she outlives all of us."

He leaves on that note and Ikora gets no studying done that night. 

**Author's Note:**

> Related to the following one-shot about Omar Agah & Toland being a dickwad: https://archiveofourown.org/works/23903758


End file.
